Page:Medieval Military Architecture in England (volume 1).djvu/452

 418 Medieval Military A^'chitechire. descended through the houses of De Meschines, De Fortibus, Multon, Lucy, and Percy, can boast a connexion with some of the most celebrated of the northern barons. It has, however, another, and certainly not less brilliant, association. In the adjacent town was born William Wordsworth, and the green court, flower-crowned walls, and gloomy dungeons of the castle are commemorated in one of the sweetest of his sonnets : — FROM THE SPIRIT OF COCKERMOUTH CASTLE. " Thou look'st upon me, and dost fondly think, Poet ! that, stricken as both are by years, We, differing once so much, are now compeers, Prepared, when each has stood his time, to sink Into the dust. Erewhile a sterner link United us ; when thou, in boyish play. Entering my dungeon, didst become a prey To soul-appalling darkness. Not a blink Of light was there ; and thus did I, thy tutor. Make thy young thoughts acquainted with the grave, While thou wert chasing the wing'd butterfly Through my green courts ; or climbing, a bold suitor, Up to the flowers whose golden progeny Still round my shatter'd brow in beauty wave." THE KEEP OF THE CASTLE OF COLCHESTER, ESSEX. HEN Hubert of Rie, standing at early dawn between the church and his castle, " Entre li mostier e sa mote," welcomed, harboured, and under the escort of his three sons, sent forward his hard-bested lord by the road still known as " Le Voye le Due," he probably little thought that the incident would become matter of history, and still less could he have anticipated the splendid reward, for this and other faithful services, his sons were to receive, twenty years later, from that same sovereign in a foreign and then unconquered land. Whether Hubert himself took part in the conquest is unknown ; he certainly did not desert his mote and mostier in the Cotentin for any EngHsh possessions, but of his sons, Ralph and Adam received lands as under tenants in the counties of Nottingham, Derby, and Kent ; and Eudo, called by Dugdale the fourth son, but the principal representative of the family in England, appears in the Survey as tenant in chief of sixty-four manors in the counties of Beds, Cambridge, Essex, Hants, Herts, Huntingdon, Lincoln, Norfolk, Northampton, and Suffolk. Of these manors twenty-five were in Essex, in which county Eudo,